—”With everything there is an increase of reliability when there are less moving parts.”
General Motors might make that claim, but I ain’t buying it.
See my example in #9.
The caveman used a cable lever with detents from the lower dash to a three-way control valve with a lever usually near the heater core.
The digital version uses many wires from the display to processor to the relays to wax motors that work the control valve SLOWLY.
After 150K we gave the car to our son he drove it another 50k and the wiring started to have issues.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
And that is without any mice chewing the new improved enviro safe green WIRES; A FAVORITE TREAT.
I understand what you are implying. And in this case I would consider the one mechanical manual cable to be less parts than than a fly by wire automatic climate system. While there are no moving mechanical parts, there are a whole bunch of digital parts and wires to fail. :)
I did change out a lot of those flexible push/pull cables! But they were caveman simple.